Sunday, August 1, 2010

A Gallimaufry

Na'vi

I've managed to get myself on a panel for a local con this fall to chat about the science of Avatar. In theory, I'm there to talk about language. We'll see how many people in the audience are interested in that.

Tsrai

Tsrai now has nice set of postural verbs. I'm still thinking about the semantics of these, especially in verb chains, but I'm ridiculously pleased to be able to say this,

we

or-ta

blas

rabbë

dzwai

3SG

drink-PST

beer

get.horizontal

happen

He drank so much beer he ended up on the ground.

Inspiration

I recently got myself a copy of The Languages of Native North America by Marianne Mithun. What an astonishing diversity of languages this continent used to have. Language inventors will find so much inspiration in this book.

I agree with you, Native American languages are a feast for conlangers who seek new features and ideas. I would also say that the same goes for Natives in all of the American continent, not only North America. Central and South America also had an astounding diversity of languages, which we are still just learning of now.

In my country for instance, there are lots and lots of undocumented languages, and the ones that are documented are very little known, I would recommend to you the Mapuchian and also the language of the Shelknam.